The Chinese socialist legal system developed steadily after its re-establishment by
the Third Plenum in 1978, according to Deng Xiaoping's vision of political stability. A framework was secured for building socialism in a peaceful environment. For
more than a decade, Communist Party leaders tried to reconcile Chinese Marxism
with a positive notion of socialist law and for more than six years, 1983-89, the
Party attempted to graft the political system on to a constitutional scheme. Current
legal reform was based on the hope that China was heading towards a comprehensive socialist legal order. But encouraging signs that China was turning away from
ideological concerns to more practical ones, geared to socialist construction, did not
dissipate scepticism concerning the Party's commitment to a legal order. Behind
the optimism, one could always perceive limits on the rule of law, namely those
imposed by the Four Cardinal Principles. The proclaimed harmony between law
and Party leadership merely obscured latent conflict. The crux of the matter was the
extent to which a legal order was feasible in a Communist regime, with a political
tradition hostile to law and enshrined in Marxist ideology. Nevertheless, the increasing political tolerance shown by the regime considerably tempered Party
arrogance and gave more scope for the development of a legal order.

One might see that a political crisis could provide a test of the Party's commitment to the rule of law.1 In retrospect, legal order, under Deng, never proceeded
smoothly. It had to survive the two-year campaign against 'spiritual pollution' after 1983 and the short-lived campaign against 'bourgeois liberalization' after the 1986
student demonstrations. Yet survive it did. The Party continued with reform and
handled any crisis legally.

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